its capacity, since if indulged it can overtake all other modes of understanding and plunge us into an enclosed state policed by the act of perception itself.
Overwhelmed by these thoughts in that scattered age between eighteen and twenty-five, it was then that Hamlet gripped me. Hungry for a path through that maze, Hamlet’s story offered a movement towards the light. Towards the play’s conclusion, as the young Prince walks towards a trap set by his stepfather, a trap he knows he will not survive, his friend Horatio advises him that he can walk away from his own fate. He replies:
Not a whit, we defy augury: there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.
Within a play of complicated expression, this section is an oasis of simplicity. Beginning with the first, heavily accented ‘if’, there are forty-two monosyllabic words in a row, with only one exception – ‘readiness’. This extended baldness of expression is exceptional in Shakespeare. For me at that age, the simplicity of this language, allied with the calm at its spirit’s centre, its message of transcendent acceptance of all the world had to offer, the good and the bad, served as a mantra.
* * *
Translated into too many languages to count, and performed more times than Shakespeare ate hot dinners, and cold ones, or drew breath for that matter, Hamlet is one of those rare documents that can be said to have brought the world closer together. Audiences all over the planet have shared in its capacity to enlarge the spectator’s openness and desire to question. It has not only shrunk space; it has also contracted time. Each person who watches or hears it is telescoped back to the moment in 1601 when an audience in the Globe first heard the opening words ‘Who’s there?’ Just as those first spectators share in every subsequent time those words have begun an evening of queasily soulful entertainment. We all share in the suspended window of time within which a play floats, experiencing our own night of only-happening-now uniqueness and sharing the pleasure with the millions of others who have heard the same words in other times and places.
In 1608, on board a ship called the Dragon, Hamlet was performed by its crew off the coast of Sierra Leone for a group of visiting dignitaries. The crew remembered enough of the play from what they had seen at the Globe to shamble together a show. Within ten years of its first performance, groups of English actors, known collectively as the English Comedians, were performing it across northern Europe in abbreviated, action-packed adaptations. Since then it has played everywhere, in theatres, fields, caves, hovels and palaces.
It has tested thousands of actors and actresses, leaving some exhilarated with triumph and some desolate with failure, and all hungering for more. It has been recorded, televised and filmed over and over and over again. The performances of actors from Sarah Bernhardt to David Tennant, from Mel Gibson to Maxine Peake have been captured for posterity, and the sheer inclusiveness of that brief list says much about the play’s openness to interpretation. It is recited in schoolrooms, quoted in boardrooms, mumbled by lovers, pondered on by sages, argued over by critics, passed on from parent to child, cursed by students, and wept over by spectators. In silence, it is stored in the heart as a fortifying secret by millions of us afraid of the bruising world. It is part of the fabric that surrounds us and sits within us. It has become, in large part, us.
* * *
In honour of the transcendent ubiquity of this play, on 23 April 2014, 450 years after the birth of Shakespeare, the Globe theatre, in response to a daft idea floated in a bar, set out on an artistic adventure almost as unique as the play we were honouring. To tour Hamlet to every country on earth. All 204. Or 197. Or however many were deemed to be countries at that particular moment. Unprecedented chutzpah and a healthy quantum of stupidity helped launch the mission. Beyond that, more practical factors made it possible. Over nine years, the Globe had formulated a style of touring as portable as the style in which actors travelled from the first Globe 400 years earlier. We had built up a network of international relationships with the Globe to Globe festival, which meant there wasn’t a corner of the world where we could not phone and find a friend. But more importantly, technology had come to a point with air travel and information hyperlinking where it was now possible to move a theatre tour across the globe at a plausible speed and prepare satisfactorily for every arrival.
The marriage of globalisation and modernity sometimes seems to transfer little more than paranoia and violence. But we looked at the possibilities thrown up by that modernity, and instead of saying ‘Why?’, we thought ‘Why not?’ Why not use the potential of the world to transport not terror or commodities, but sixteen human souls, armed with hope, technique and strong shoes, their set packed into their luggage, the play wired into their memories, and present to every corner of the world, with a playful truth, the strangest and most beautiful play ever written. Why not?
Exactly two years later, on 23 April 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the same sixteen people returned to the Globe, having visited 190 countries and, via a series of performances in refugee camps, the peoples of 197 nations. They had played in amphitheatres, in bars, on roundabouts, in studios, on the shores of oceans, in front of thousands crammed into stadia, and in front of a handful of Romanian children in the rain.
At this moment, it would be appealing to adopt a deep voice, or its prose equivalent, and write: ‘This book is the story of that journey.’ But it would be misleading. The story of that journey can never be told: it is too big, too profuse. Each gig offered up so much material, so many intersections with politics, culture and history, that each visit could prompt a book. There were 200 of them. It might also be something of an impertinence, as I only visited twenty of the venues, and those who really carry the stories are the company – the twelve actors and the four stage managers. They made the whole journey. They all have remarkable stories to tell. Each of the twenty countries I visited felt like an injection of rich information for the imagination to work over. A theatre company has a special capacity to learn about an area, freely moving from shambolic shebeen to ambassador’s drawing room. Each visit was short but never short on insights. There is much that a tortoise can witness that a swift will miss, but the opposite also has a certain weight of truth.
An exhaustive hoovering up of every detail would be beyond me, but I was fortunate enough to see much that amused and provoked. Always through the prism of Hamlet. Each country has thrown fresh light on the play, its large themes and its smaller nooks and crannies, just as this protean play has been able to throw new light on the world and its many faces. The tour changed my view of the play, the play changed my understanding of the tour, and both shifted my perspectives on the world and on myself. I have tried to set down some of this dialogue between the play and the world, to see how each illuminated the other.
This book will tell several stories, amongst others the story of Hamlet itself, of how this infinite masterpiece was born, how it grew into the world and how, with its generosity of spirit, it still helps us to understand our changing world. It will attempt to understand how the play has travelled so far and penetrated so deeply. At each moment, my response to the play shifted, with each insight bringing fresh confusion, each confusion fresh insight, and I try to mark those moments. I do so in the full knowledge that this is only watching a train covering a few stations on a long journey. Hamlet will never stand waiting for us; it will always demand fresh understanding. The moment of ‘Aha! I’ve got it!’ will never arrive, nor should it.
Everywhere the play visited, it encountered countries of vast difference, caught in contrasting historical and political moments. The performance cannot hold a mirror up to so many forms of nature, but Hamlet, with his restless desire to dream up a new sensibility, speaks to all people in any moment trying to create a better future out of the ashes of a world that breaks their heart. As such, our production spoke to many of the people who encountered it, and learnt from
